The Ancient Paths

by Graham Robb

  The university at Augustodunum, founded more than twelve centuries before the Sorbonne, was still a famous seat of learning in the fourth century AD, when the porticoes of its schools were adorned with one of the lost treasures of ancient Gaul – a scale map of the world showing seas, rivers and towns and the distances between them. By then, the university was already a venerable institution. Professors who proudly called themselves sons of Druids (presumably in private) were teaching at Bayeux and Bordeaux. They represented a scholastic tradition older than Augustodunum itself. When Diviciacus qualified as a Druid in the early first century BC, he would have received his robes, not at Augustodunum, but at the oppidum of Bibracte, which was the capital of the Aedui before the Gallic War.

  Two slow cycling hours to the west of Autun, Mont Beuvray rises out of the forests of the Morvan plateau. The summit remains in sight throughout a day’s travel on either side: its ‘visibility footprint’ covers several thousand square kilometres between Burgundy and the Massif Central. The nearest village, Saint-Léger-sous-Beuvray, lies eight kilometres to the east. From there, the road saunters off into beech woods before suddenly adopting the kind of gradients that signify a return to an earlier age: medieval mules were more patient than modern drivers, but even they would have baulked at the final ascent, which conjures up thoughts of penance and siege. In these parts of Gaul, the scale on an inclinometer could be marked off in centuries instead of degrees. Tracks like the one that climbs towards the oppidum from the Col du Rebout belong to a period when urban settlement took very different forms.

  Roman visitors to Bibracte may well have felt that they were entering some other-worldly realm. On the undulating plateau at the summit of the mountain, monumental walls loomed out of the forest. All around were funeral pyres and orderly cemeteries that had been carefully maintained for many decades. After passing through the towering gateway, a visitor was greeted by the stench of tanneries and the forges’ smoke. The pre-Roman capital of the Aedui was a teeming town of shops and small factories, covering an area about two-thirds the size of medieval Paris. The streets were made of compacted stone and gravel, with a layer of sand to prevent them from becoming slippery in the winter. After the industrial quarter came the residential suburb and, beyond that, the shops and the temple, with a wide-open view of wheat fields and coppiced woods. In the east, smoke could be seen rising from the lands of the Sequani where the iron was mined. If the weather was fine, the jagged white hem of the Alps marked the horizon.

  Near the centre of the oppidum, an unusual object seemed to block the street. One of the most intriguing archaeological discoveries of the last hundred years, it was so well preserved that when it was excavated in 1987 it looked like a modern reconstruction – a basin in the form of a slender oval, beautifully formed from blocks of pink granite. For some reason, the stone had been dressed using techniques normally applied to limestone: the stone was local but the masons were Mediterranean. Several teams of archaeologists have been unable to determine its purpose. It was too shallow to have served as a cistern, and there was no nearby source of running water. Some have suggested a ‘water cult’ or a foundation monument. Only two things are certain: the lateral axis of the basin is the line of the summer solstice sunset and the winter solstice sunrise at Bibracte, and the oval itself is the result of complex geometrical calculations. It would have been a familiar object to the apprentice Druids, and we shall return to the pink-granite basin at the appropriate point in the curriculum.

  Most of the inhabitants of Bibracte lived in warm, well-insulated houses of wattle and daub; some of them may have had slaves. The school would have been comfortable and well equipped. Standards of hygiene were very high. According the Greek historian Timagenes, the Gauls were extremely punctilious about cleanliness and elegance: ‘You will never see in all these countries a man or a woman, however poor, either dirty or in rags’. The population of the Aeduan capital would have been particularly elegant. Though it stood on the summit of a mountain, it was one of the largest and best-supplied towns in eastern Gaul – ‘maximum et copiosissimum’, according to Caesar, who chose to spend the winter of 52–51 BC there, six hundred miles from home. In a town of teachers and students, he would not have lacked scribes, writing materials and reference works. The short passage on the Druids in De Bello Gallico, once thought to have been copied from an earlier source, is now recognized as an up-to-date description of the Druid order and the most reliable of all texts on the subject. The fact is rendered almost invisible by murky views of the Celtic past: one of the classics of world literature was written in an Iron Age oppidum.

  A young Aeduan arriving at Druid school, knowing something of the superstitions that common people expressed on curse-tablets and at shrines in the form of crude oaken images, might have hoped to be provided with potions and magic spells. If so, they would have been disappointed. Druidic science was an arduous discipline. The young people, said Caesar, must ‘learn by heart a great number of verses’ – he supposed that this was why the education could last twenty years; ‘it is considered sacrilegious to commit the verses to writing’. For this reason, the Druids are often said to have been illiterate, yet Caesar went on to note that ‘in almost all other matters, public and private, they use the Greek alphabet’.20 His own opinion was that rote learning was a pedagogical device designed to keep the minds of young Gauls healthy and alert. When, ten years later, during his siege of Alexandria, he accidentally set fire to the Great Library, he might have pondered the benefits of storing knowledge in thousands of trained minds.

  Even the teachings that generations of Druids kept in their memories would one day disappear. Now, almost nothing seems to be left of them. Yet patterns of thought sometimes remain visible like crop marks in a field. The annals of the Celts, their religious and moral precepts, the names of places and heroes were preserved in the tripartite forms familiar from Celtic art and theology, just as they were later recorded in the triads of medieval Wales.

  Triads were simple mnemonics that served as keys to greater stores of wisdom. Some were verbal maps of a kingdom, like the complex routes that were memorized by sailors, or like the Irish Dindsenchas (‘the lore of places’), which inculcated a sense of real and sacred geography by recounting the route taken by a god or a hero. Others were signposts at the meeting of three roads that led to different shires of tribal lore: ‘The Three Wives of Arthur’, ‘The Three Mistresses of Arthur’, ‘The Three Chief Rivers of the Island of Britain’, ‘The Three Unrestrained Ravagings of the Island of Britain’, etc. Mnemonic rhymes are still a common form of personal data storage (the number of days in each month, the notes on the lines of the treble clef, the burning properties of wood), and many Druids who were sent to take charge of remote temples must have blessed their teachers for imprinting the useful formulae on their brains.

  It is astonishing how the lightest breath on the dust of an ancient text can reveal a lost Druidic lesson. Statements about the Celts’ beliefs often fall into threes and take a loosely strophic form. Caesar’s famous statement that ‘Gaul is divided into three parts’ may have a Celtic origin, and Pomponius Mela’s listing of the three peoples of Gaul may once have been a pair of triads:

  From the Pyrenees to the Garonne are the Aquitanians, from the Garonne to the Seine the Celts, and from the Seine to the Rhine the Belgians.

  The leading lights among the Aquitanians are the Ausci, among the Celts the Aedui, and among the Belgians the Treveri.

  The flattering reference to the Aedui and to their allies, the Treveri, suggests that something very similar to this litany of origins once formed part of a history lesson at Bibracte.

  When Timagenes was collecting information for his History of the Gauls, of which only a few excerpts survive, he heard the Celts’ own story of their origins. Although the triadic verses were never written down, they were so well rooted in the minds of educated Celts that they came quite naturally to the lips of his informants:

  The Druids rel
ate [‘memorant’: literally, ‘bring to memory’] as a true thing that part of the population [of Gaul] was indigenous, but that others flooded in from the outermost islands and regions across the Rhine, driven from their homes by frequent wars and inundations of the fiery seas [‘fervidi maris’].

  Some say that after the destruction of Troy, a handful of Trojans fleeing from the Greeks, and scattering far and wide, took possession of these empty places.

  The natives of these regions assert above all . . . that Herakles, son of Amphitryon, hastening to destroy the cruel tyrants, Geryon and Tauriscus, who were molesting Gaul and Spain, having overcome both, married a noble woman and begat many children who gave their names to the regions they ruled.

  The names of those many Herculean children – and, in the matrilineal Celtic tradition, their mothers – would then have formed a geographical roll call of the Celtic tribes: Celtus, progenitor of the Celts; Galates, progenitor of the Gauls; Sardus, who gave his name to the Pyrenean Sardones; Bretannos, whose daughter gave birth to the Pretani.

  The diversity of origins suggests a lively historical tradition. What Timagenes took to be competing views were probably the components of a broader picture that covered the entire Celtic world. It matches the historical evidence quite well, and it proves that, unlike some of their modern admirers, the ancient Celts never claimed a single ethnic origin (fig. 24).

  Like all well-hidden secrets, the most important mnemonic riddle was there for all to see. The word ‘Druid’ was a cleverly tangled knot of meanings, and unravelling it would have required a long lecture on historical semantics. The ‘uid’ belongs to the same family as the Sanskrit ‘veda’ (‘knowledge’) and the Latin ‘videre’ (‘to see’). The ‘dru’ could mean either ‘very great’ or ‘oak’. Welsh and Breton forms derived from ‘do-are-wid’ contain the word ‘are’, meaning ‘eastward’, ‘in front of’ or ‘into the future’. Other words that were etymologically unrelated may have woven their connotations into the puzzle: ‘druta’ (‘swift’), ‘drutos’ (‘strong’ or ‘solid’), ‘uidua’ (‘tree’ or ‘wood’).

  The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus found this riddling habit of the Celts exasperating (‘they use one word when they mean another’), and so do some modern etymologists who disagree about the exact meaning of ‘Druid’. The argument is endless because the word is deliberately ambiguous. A Druid was a great sage or scholar who knew the secrets of the oak, or whose wisdom was as strong and solid as wood, who looked to the east and who saw into the future. Some nuances have probably faded away for ever, but enough remain to show what games a Druid master could play with the philosophical pun. ‘Dysgogan derwydon meint a deruyd’ , said a tenth-century Welsh poem: ‘Druids predict all that will come to pass’.

  24. Legendary origins of the Gauls and the greatest extent of Celtic influence

  From Timagenes’ History of the Gauls.

  Before the apprentice Druids could begin to predict the future, there was a vast amount to be learned. Apart from history and geography, they studied moral philosophy, religion and theology. The keystone of the Druidic creed was the Pythagorean belief in the immortality of the soul and a life after death. Caesar naturally considered the military advantages of a belief in the transmigration of souls: ‘They wish above all to convince their pupils that souls do not perish [‘interire’] but pass [‘transire’] after death from one body into another, and this they see as an inducement to valour, for the dread of death is thereby negated.’ Caesar’s interpreter – perhaps Diviciacus himself – seems to have captured an echo of the rhyming pun that fixed the precept in the mind: ‘non interire, sed transire’.

  According to the geographer Pomponius Mela, this was the only Druid teaching that ever ‘escaped’ into the wider world, yet the secret verses were so potent that fragments can still be picked up among Greek and Latin prose. ‘The Druids express their philosophy in riddles, urging men to honour the gods, to do no evil, and to exercise courage.’ This triadic litany, quoted by Diogenes Laertius from a work of the fourth century BC, is remarkably similar to a Welsh triad that was first written down in the thirteenth century AD: ‘These are the three main principles of wisdom: obedience to the laws of the Almighty, concern for the common good, and courage in the face of the accidents of life.’

  Perhaps the Druids were not so secretive after all. Some of their lessons were reserved for initiates, but much of the education was public. A teaching order that had managed to syncretise thousands of local gods and legends into a European pantheon, and which had more influence over the actions of individual states than the United Nations does today, was obviously not given to incomprehensible mutterings in secluded forests. The Gaulish gentleman who noticed Lucian of Samosata gaping in horror at the image of Ogmios-Herakles (here) was either a Druid himself or a graduate of Druid school. ‘Stranger,’ he said, ‘I shall explain the enigma of this portrait that seems to trouble you so.’ The man spoke impeccable Greek and chattered away in the pleasantly teasing tones of a man of the world on the subjects of comparative religion, mythology, art and literature. He littered his conversation with quotations from Homer, Euripides and a Greek comic poet whose works are otherwise unknown. He had a seductively soothing pedagogical manner which charmed his troubled listener and enlightened him far beyond his expectations. As Cicero had discovered in Rome, a Druid’s conversation could be delightful:

  You should not be surprised to see the tongue of Herakles, that embodiment of eloquence, leading men by chains attached to their ears. Consider the relation between ear and tongue: this tongue-piercing is not intended as an insult. Was it not one of your comic poets who said, ‘The tongue of the chatterbox is always pierced at its tip’?

  At this point, after the history, the geography, the moral philosophy and religion, the Greek language and literature, the boys and girls who had gone to the Druids for a general education would return to their families. The exoteric curriculum gave way to the esoteric, and the students who remained would now be inducted into the higher mysteries of Druidism.

  8

  The Druidic Syllabus, II: Advanced

  Behind all the other mysteries stood the tree that gave the Druids their name. According to Pliny, the Druids planted groves of oak, ‘and they perform none of their religious rites without using its leaves’. This is one of several hints of Hellenic influence. The oak-wreathed head of the Greek sun god appears on many Celtic coins, and the oak groves of the Druids may have been designed for the kind of divination familiar to Odysseus, who journeyed to the remote shrine of Dodona ‘to hear the lofty oak express the will of Zeus’ in the rustling of its leaves. But an institution of such geographical and philosophical scope would have had many origins. In the never-ending realms of folklore, the branches of the oak point in all directions like the knotted fingers of a witch. The Celtic oak may have been a cosmic tree that spanned the three worlds, like the ash tree, Yggdrasil, of Norse mythology, or a relic of local, prehistoric beliefs that had been codified by the Druids. Caesar believed that Druidism had been ‘discovered’ (‘reperta’) in Britain (here), and the preponderance of oak in English woodland may indeed have given rise to local cults that have left their trace in the hundreds of ‘oak’ place names that share an etymological origin with ‘Druid’: Darroch, Darwen, Derby, Derwent, etc.

  The keys to Celtic mysteries usually lie in an observable reality rather than in a vague superstition. Oak is one of the best firewoods (‘Oaken logs, if dry and old / Keep away the winter’s cold’), and one of the best ways in which to get to know a tree is to prepare it for burning. Divine utterances are no longer perceptible in the rustling of oak leaves, but faces can still be seen in that most anthropomorphic of trees. Many of those faces have Celtic features. A few hours of attacking fallen oak branches with a bow saw and a splitting maul will produce a representative selection of ancient Celtic art works. The snags and antlered ends of dead branches are the beaked monsters of Celtic fibulae and flagon handles. The oval kno
ts are the eyes of a Celtic god or the war-trumpet called a carnyx, and the pendant clusters of male flowers and the knobbly burrs that turn into beautiful whorls in the planed wood are the nodules and incrustations on gold armbands and torcs. Where a branch has cracked and pulled away from the trunk, the sinewy labyrinth of circles looks like the pattern book of a Celtic artist.

  ‘The Celtic Druids investigated to the very highest point the Pythagorean philosophy’, said Hippolytus of Rome; they practise divination ‘from calculations and numbers by the Pythagorean art’.21 The oak was an object of particular scrutiny. This was not the pagan ‘tree worship’ that Christian missionaries would try to eradicate, nor was it simply an artistic imitation of natural phenomena. Celtic art was a scientific attempt to decipher the secrets of creation, ‘for offerings should be rendered to the gods by philosophers who are experienced in the nature of the divine and who speak, as it were, the same language as the gods’ (Diodorus Siculus). In order to learn that language, they ‘conducted investigations and attempted to explain the system of interrelations [or, in a variant text, ‘the inner laws’] and the highest secrets of nature’ (Timagenes).

  The Pythagoreans believed that the universe could be explained by numbers. Two and a half thousand years before particle physics and the bio-inspired algorithms of computer science, a belief in the power of numbers was considered by most educated people to be a form of mystical obfuscation, but in the tangle of the oak grove there were shapes that seemed to obey the geometrical laws that had been described by Pythagoras. The contortions of the oak and the leaves and berries of the mistletoe appear in almost every imaginable Celtic object: a shield cover, the phalera of a harness, a cooking pot, a coin. Even when the design seems to be complete, the whole picture is never revealed. The principle of construction is always hidden, as it is in nature, and these swirls and mazy lines are easily mistaken for the meanderings of an individual artist’s fantasy.